Rahul vs. Modi for PM? No – time for dynasts is running out

Will Rahul Gandhi be Prime Minister in 2014? Unlikely, for three reasons.

First, he may not want to be. (Rahul at every public opportunity – the last being his zero-hour intervention in parliament on August 26 – has displayed both lack of appetite and talent for the top job.) Second, the Congress may well lose the next general election so Rahul may have to settle for being leader of the Opposition till 2019. And third, India is beginning to move beyond dynastic politics.

But is dynasty all that bad? It surely can’t be if we’ve voted members of the same family into the prime ministership for 38 years (Jawaharlal 17 years, Indira 16, Rajiv 5) and elected to office the same party (the Congress) for 52 out of our 64 post-independence years?

Feudalism still runs deep in Indian society. But all good (and bad) things come to an end – eventually. Rahul is sharp enough to know this – even though the glib sycophants in the Congress who treat dynasty as a political livelihood don’t. India – especially young India – rightly regards dynastic politics with growing disfavour.

But we are voted in to power, protest young dynasts from various parties who, following in the Congress’s large footsteps, have flourished all across India: the Karunanidhis, the Pawars, the Hoodas, the Abdullahs, the Reddys, the Yadavs. If being elected gives politicians absolute legitimacy, Narendra Modi – elected thrice over by voters in Gujarat and virtually certain to be elected a fourth time in 2012 – should be the most legitimate and credible politician in India.

In an evolving democracy, voters can be shortchanged in several ways by politicians with malintent.

1. The Poverty Card: The country ranks 119th on the Human Development Index (HDI) 2011. India’s GDP would have been double today’s $1.5 trillion (Rs. 70 lakh crore) had Indira Gandhi not asphyxiated the economy with the Licence Raj through the 1960s and 1970s. Poverty deepened as a result.

Impoverished voters in India, however, can no longer be taken for granted. In the face of brazen corruption, as Karunanidhi’s DMK learned the hard way in Tamil Nadu, votes cannot be bought. What was true of Tamil Nadu in May 2011 could well be true of India in May 2014.

2. The Caste Card: This has been played by regional parties to good electoral effect. The caste factor has been mercilessly exploited by Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh but it is abused in several other states as well.

3. The Communal Card: Out of the 28.55% national voteshare the Congress won in the May 2009 Lok Sabha election, over 11% came from the lock it has on the 13.50% Muslim vote. Without the Muslim vote, the Congress would be in permanent Opposition. Only around 17% of the 83% Hindu vote now goes to it – most from the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid (hence Sonia Gandhi’s emphasis on MNREGA and other social sector schemes which help tighten its grip on this narrowing slice of the downtrodden electorate).

Can the Congress buy itself out of its electoral trap? Examine its finances: the party’s audited balance sheet for 2008-09 shows it collected Rs. 496.88 crore, most of it from the sale of “coupons” to benevolent (and mostly anonymous) donors. The BJP’s audited income for 2008-09 was Rs. 220.02 crore. (Astonishingly, the audited balance sheets for 2009-10 of these parties are not yet available for public scrutiny.) Election Commission officials say privately that the real income of parties like the Congress and the BJP is at least 10 times their declared income. Most large parties are funded by corporate donors, creating a quid pro quo nexus. The result: kickbacks from myriad scams find their way into parties’ treasuries as undeclared income. It is this black money that funds most MPs’ election campaigns, including those with criminal records.

This represents a classical feudocracy: rich politicians, poor voters. In an evolved democracy, it is the other way around.

For dynastic parties like the Congress, it’s now a race against time. A worried Rahul, for example, knows that every percentage point increase in Indian literacy levels could shave half-a-percentage point off the Congress’s national voteshare of 28%. The more educated the voter, the more empowered she is. In no democracy globally, where education and literacy levels are high, is dynasty in power. Development is the enemy of dynasty. As India develops economically and socially, dynastic politics will inevitably wither. Then questions like Rahul vs. Modi for PM in 2014 will sound faintly embarrassing.

How long will this process of de-dynastisation – to use a neologism – take? Ten years? Five? Somewhere in between would be good bet. By 2020, dynasts like the Bhuttos in Pakistan may still be around. But India would have outgrown them.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .

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Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .